Was crimping connectors wrong for 8 years until a guy in Atlanta set me straight

I was over at a buddy's shop outside Atlanta last month helping him wire up a Garmin panel and he stopped me mid-crimp. Said look at the barrel after you squeeze it. I'd been using the wrong setting on my crimper the whole time. Turns out I was crushing the insulation instead of the metal part and it still worked fine for years. But one bump or vibration and those things can fail in flight. He showed me the proper way with a D-sub pin and I felt like an idiot. The insulation on the wire should still be visible after the crimp, not pushed back into the pin. How many of you actually check your crimps under a magnifier or just assume they're good?

3 comments

3 Comments

rodriguez.mia1d ago

A magnifier sounds like a good habit, especially with small pins where a bad crimp is easy to miss.

emma961d ago

Shoved my phone in my pocket with the flashlight on trying to look at a tiny pin once, nearly blinded myself. Rodriquez.mia knows what's up, a magnifier makes a world of difference on those cramped connector blocks. I keep a cheap one clipped to my bench now, caught a stray wire hair barely touching the wrong pin last week. Would have been a real headache to find that later with the multimeter.

richard_young801d ago

@rodriguez.mia 100% agree. My eyesight's so bad these days I need a magnifier just to tell if I'm looking at the right pin or just a speck of dust. Probably saved me from a few embarrassing shorts.